The same way - and the only way - you usually get large numbers of people to engage in apparently cooperative or altruistic behaviour: bribery. Offer people a small reduction in electricity rates (or a cash rebate, or some other real-money incentive) in exchange for allowing the utility to remotely adjust/control their consumption.

Many utilities (in the United States and elsewhere) are already doing this with air conditioner thermostats. They offer a rebate or rate break in exchange for giving the utility the ability to remotely shut off your air conditioner for a set period of time (generally no more than one hour per day, and often less) during high demand periods. Some have gone to even 'smarter' systems, which allow the end-user a small number of 'overrides'. (Usually you can go without the A/C for a few minutes, but if you're hosting a party and need the cooling, then you can have it on a handful of occasions each year. This little bit of added flex)

I see no serious technological, political, or social barrier to implementing a similar system to regulate charging systems for electric vehicles. If anything, there's even more flexibility here--the car (and its owner) don't care whether it does its six hours of charging between 9pm and 3am, or between midnight and 6am, or as a dozen 30-minute blocks spread over the whole night.

If police are allowed to make arrests without generating public records, that creates a whole set of different, generally more serious problems for a society.

I hadn't realized that Mothers Against Drunk Driving had gotten involved in nuclear non-proliferation. Talk about mission creep....

If it weren't Florida we were talking about, I might suggest it had something to do with better-trained or more-skilled drivers. If you're competent at moving your vehicle in reverse, it's far safer to back in to a parking spot than it is to back out. You want and need a clear, broad field of view when leaving a parking space; when you back out your vision to the sides is almost completely blocked until you're halfway out into the lane of traffic.

One memorable evening, my uncle saw a vehicle weaving across a multilane highway. He assumed that the driver was drunk, until he got close enough to discover that she was actually knitting.

I've found that a pretty good way to identify the "bad drivers" is by looking to see which ones are fiddling with their cell phones, Blackberries, or GPS receivers.

The drivers who use these devices but think they are driving well are generally just sufficiently distracted not to notice all the errors that they're making. I don't think anyone gets into their car in the morning and says "I'm going to do something dangerous today that might kill myself or others", and yet we still have thousands of people dying in car accidents.

This Slashdot discussion is an excellent study in seeing how people resolve cognitive dissonance. Everyone likes to see themselves as a good driver. Using a cell phone is a serious distraction. The logical conclusion is that people who use cell phones while driving are not good drivers. The dissonance is resolved by carving out personal exceptions ("Sure, some people can't handle the phone, but I'm a really good driver") or dismissing the evidence ("I'm sure the study is flawed, because the people who got into the accidents were bad drivers anyway").

This isn't exactly a surprise. The only way NASA can get funding is to promise the moon (usually figuratively, though occasionally literally) on an implausible shoestring budget, and then hope that the real costs later on don't cause management to scupper an already-in-progress high-profile project. This is a pretty common strategy in government funded technology and research projects, and it's something that's as old as NASA.

The Mercury program came in at roughly double its original estimated price.

The Air Force anticipated in 1958 that a lunar program would cost $1.5 billion and be complete by the end of 1965. In 1961, NASA's experts said they could do the job by 1967, at a cost of $7 billion. By the time Neil Armstrong took his one small step, it was 1969, and the program had rung up a price tag of about $25 billion (in 1960s dollars).

Looking at the last space telescope project, the Hubble was originally budgeted at $400 million. It cost $2.5 billion by launch time, and total program costs to date run to between $4.5 and $6 billion.

This problem isn't unique to NASA. Technology development programs in the military offer some particularly good examples. Lockheed completed their contract for the F-22 Raptor more than two years and ten billion dollars behind schedule--but they still received more than $800 million in performance awards for their work.

Quite. How much fuel was used by the farmers who harvested the 'plant-based bioresin', and how many liters of industrial solvents were used in its manufacture?

Let's be honest here--an entire pair of glasses, even with evil petroleum-product-based plastic lenses, is going to tip the scales at maybe a 100 grams (less than a quarter of a pound). That's how much oil is actually in the glasses themselves. Saving a few ounces of petroleum every couple of years is an utterly negligible savings.

While these frames may make a novel fashion statement, there are smarter ways to try to cut consumption of oil.

Not when you add in shipping cost. It may exceed the price of the cable for shipping to North American addresses, and runs close to $30 for delivery to the UK. It's not a major issue for multiple items shipped to the U.S. or Canada, but still--you should be comparing the actual prices paid to get a cable. (There's probably a comparable UK online retailer with lower shipping costs, though....)

Besides, it should be a no-brainer by now that maintaining a bricks and mortar retail presence does add at least a small premium to prices. On the retailer's side, they need to pay for space somewhere that customers can actually get to, they need to have full-time sales staff, and they need to deal with shoplifters. On the customer's side, they get to actually see and handle the products before they buy them, and (during store hours) they can have the product right now. (They may also be able to talk to the sales staff, which can be a mixed blessing depending on the ethics and competence of a given retailer's crew.) There's no shipping charges, and returns or exchanges can be done face to face with a live person.

That said - and as other posters have noted - the purchasing power of GBP in the UK is not what would be expected from the nominal GBP-USD exchange rate. With few exceptions (pints of beer, thank god, among them) prices for goods in the UK are roughly the same numbers as for the corresponding items in the US. (A two-dollar coffee in New York is going to sell for two pounds in London.) On the bright side, a similar phenomenon happens with wages as well. It can be quite lucrative to work in the UK and vacation/retire somewhere else.

Installation costs will be significantly higher than for a simple four-way stop or lighted intersection; they require more land and a larger paved area. In principle, the larger paved area will also have higher ongoing maintenance costs.

On the other hand, this is offset somewhat by the potential for reduced maintenance costs. The larger area may require more streetlighting for night safety and greater costs due to maintenance of more pavement, however there will be no ongoing cost of traffic light maintenance. At properly-designed roundabouts, heavy vehicles will spend less time stopped, sharply reducing the costly-to-repair 'wheel trough' indentations observed in front of many traffic lights.

On a personal level, drivers will spend less time getting to and passing through the roundabout than they would at a conventional intersection. They will enjoy measurable fuel savings from reduced driving time and (more important) a reduction in fuel-costly stops and starts.

While I fear this may be an (emotionally) unpopular assertion here on Slashdot, could it be that pool of U.S. drivers is inherently less-skilled than drivers in many other developed countries? Yes, yes--I know that you (whomever you might be, dear American who is reading this comment right now) are a superb, attentive, alert, efficient, far-above-average driver, but for a moment consider just how stupid and inconsiderate all those other yahoos you have to deal with on the road are.

The fact is, it's harder to get a driver's license in a lot of other countries. The standards and expectations are higher. In the U.S., I exaggerate only very slightly to suggest that a driver's license (and even automobile ownership) are seen as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege. Most places, public transit is something that poor people use until they work hard enough to live the American dream (with accompanying house in the 'burbs and two-car garage).

Many other driving nations impose stricter conditions on new drivers, graduated licensing schemes (which require the passages of time and/or tests before new drivers are allowed greater driving privileges--the use of high-speed highways, driving late at night, driving without another experienced driver, etc. may all be prohibited to new drivers), older minimum driving ages, and more complex driving tests than the United States.

Despite its abundant roundabouts, the UK enjoys a non-motorway death rate about 15% below that of the U.S. (Their motorway death rate is more than 60% less, but that's pretty much irrelevant to the roundabout issue.) Better public transit also means that people who can't or shouldn't be driving are less tempted to do so.

If that's what you got from reading my comment, you're not reading my comment.

Reflexive tendencies towards self-defence notwithstanding (and I do wonder what sort of soft spot I've touched), I'm sure that most Vine reviewers don't feel that they're being manipulated or biased by the gifts they receive. The vast majority, I'm sure, certainly aren't deliberately slanting their reviews in hopes of acquiring more free stuff.

On the other hand, when asked, the doctors receiving the free pens, and stuffed toys, and dinners, and other pharmaceutical company perks will also emphatically tell you that the company gifts have no effect on their prescribing habits. They would be aghast at the very suggestion that their judgement might be ever-so-slightly twisted by tiny trinkets. And yet...pharmaceutical companies don't spend their marketing budget frivolously. They invest where they expect to get a return.

The doctors receiving these freebies fall into two camps. The naive think that virtually all doctors are above such influences; there might be one or two bad apples, but the profession's integrity is too great to be compromised. The self-deceived acknowledge that other doctors may be influenced to one degree or another, but know that their own judgement is superior to the average, and that they are not swayed.

In the same way that every driver thinks they're above average - safer and smoother than those other idiots on the road - most every doctor thinks they are above influence by trinkets, and every Vine reviewer carves out a personal assumption of superior judgement. They're not bad people, they're just ignorant (wilfully or otherwise) of basic human psychology, and trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance. ("Good people don't take bribes" but "I like to get free stuff". Therefore, "It's okay to take the free stuff and I'm not a bad person as long as I persuade myself that I'm not being influenced.")

And the doctors don't prescribe the new acid reflux drug when their patient comes in with a wrist fracture. A free pen with a logo doesn't mean that every patient gets the shiny new drug, it's just to bias the physician's selection. In the case of Vine reviews, it also means that - no matter what you tell yourself - your assessment of 'value for money' is going to be off, because deep down inside, you know you didn't put your own money down.

Yes.

If free stuff didn't result in better reviews, businesses wouldn't be giving away free stuff to reviewers.

Medical doctors are highly paid, non-anonymous, well-educated, and government-licensed, but their prescribing habits are still influenced by pharmaceutical company reps giving out logo-covered pens. If an elite group of highly-trained, thoroughly-tested individuals making life-or-death decisions can be influenced by crappy gifts, do you really think some anonymous, unpaid, unregulated, and unsupervised reviewer is going to be more resistant to that sort of influence?

Fortunately, the market is usually smarter than a Slashdot poster. The rest of us have already realized that pennies are worthless wastes of time. A penny is what someone earning minimum wage collects for about four seconds work.

The smallest Australian dollar (worth about the same as a Canadian or U.S. dollar) denomination is 5 cents; their 1 and 2 cent pieces were discontinued in 1991--without destroying their currency.

While the euro includes 1 and 2 cent coins, Finland and the Netherlands officially discourage their use; retailers in many other Eurozone countries informally discourage the use of these least-useful denominations.

The Swiss franc (again, comparable in value) is divided into 100 rappen. The 1 rappen piece was legal tender until 2007, but avoided as much as possible for decades before. In general, when one considers countries which don't understand banking, Switzerland tends not to appear high on the list.

I can't dispute that even under the best of circumstances, there will be trips that are inefficient or circuitous by mass transit. In densely urbanized centers these 'difficult' trips can be minimized (or nearly eliminated) by grid-layout bus systems coupled to light rail and subway backbones, but not every urban area has the population density to support that level of infrastructure, nor the geography (and absence of geographic and architectural obstacles) to permit it. There will also be populations (particularly in rural areas) which are difficult or prohibitively costly to serve. The car (or some other means of individual, independent transport) will almost certainly always be a practical necessity for some fraction of people.

That said, when you chose to live where you do, did you make access to transit a high personal priority? Or did you choose a place that had ample parking and easy access to the highway? On the flip side, it's almost certain that your employer didn't consider access to public transit an important issue when siting their offices. (In the United States, there is almost universally an assumption of car ownership, and access to transit is an afterthought. In all but the largest cities, public transit is for poor people; a sop for the lowest classes who can't (yet) afford a car.)

Regarding your other comment about the disruption caused by a transit strike, it is possible to declare transit workers an essential service and eliminate their right to strike. Contract disputes are settled through a binding arbitration process, rather than through strikes (or lockouts). Yes, this generally results in slightly higher personnel costs, but it eliminates the massive economic dislocations that can be caused by the temporary loss of mass transit. Other classes of public workers (particularly police officers, firefighters, and ambulance crews) are often declared essential and subject to similar provisions. A number of jurisdictions (including the city of New York) already bar transit workers from striking.